The present invention relates generally to the field of networked computing. More particularly, the invention provides a reusable multimodal application on a mobile device. As used herein, multimodality comprises any human mode of interaction on the input side of an application, for example, the user's voice, and/or any visual mode, etc., that allows users to speak, hear, type, touch or see in that application, and one or more human interaction modes on the output side of the application such as the ability to hear and visually see the output. Multimodal interactions thus extend web or other application user interface to allow multiple modes of interaction, offering users, for example, the choice of using their voice, or an input device such as a key pad, keyboard, mouse or stylus. For output, users will, for example, be able to listen to spoken prompts and audio, and to view information on graphical displays.
The market for ring tones, wall papers, and other content is a large and rapidly growing business for mobile operators and content providers. In addition, a significant number of commercial transactions take place over wireless application protocol (WAP) capable mobile devices. The content in the top-level menu visual interface of the WAP capable mobile devices need to be easily accessible to the user in order to effectively perform commercial transactions. Content that cannot be easily found and located by subscribers directly is a lost revenue opportunity for mobile operators and content providers.
Increasingly, applications are moved from a static environment, for example, a desktop computer, to a mobile environment or a set-top box environment, where the mobile devices are smaller and packed with functionalities. The keypad input facility in the mobile device is not user friendly for all types of input operations, and the ability to interact is constrained by the form factor of the device. There is an opportunity to improve the effectiveness in the use of current mobile visual applications on mobile devices, for example, for mobile devices using a browser, WAP, or x hyper text markup language (xHTML).
There is an unmet market need for a method and system that precludes the need of performing custom development for each application in order to provide a multimodal functionality to the mobile device.
There is an unmet market need for a method and system that implements multimodal functionality without requiring a replacement of the entire software or hardware infrastructure of the mobile device.